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Monday, 3 March 2014

Art Mondays!

For Christmas/birthday, I received 'Chinese Brush Paintings' kit. It has paints, stiff hair and soft hair paint brushes, ink stone, paper, and instruction book. A few weeks ago, I decided I was ready to tackle the kit. The book says that the idea of Chinese Brush painting is minimalism with a lot of white space. It also involves nature scenes which I enjoy painting so excellent choice!

The warm up exercises involved painting fish and bamboo and practice with how to use the brushes. I found the ink stone is really hard to use. The idea is to add water to the ink stone and mix the water into it to make ink. It is easy in theory but for the rabbit I painted, it was really hard to get it to be a solid black colour. I think it all just takes practice.

My practice fish!

Ink block!

Ink made!

The instructions are definitely confident in the painter's abilities as they go 'Step 1: draw this picture, Step 2+3: Add minor details, Step 4: Do the rest of it!'.

I painted a rabbit from the books! But he ended up being too big to add the second carrot that was suppose to be on the ground. So a week later, I painted a new version of the rabbit.

I gave up on the ink well at the end and just used black paint as I couldn't get the ink to become solid black.

2 comments:

David VanSlyke
said...

I love the fish and bunnies! Good job! Marsha has been doing a lot of painting with acrylic since Christmas so the kitchen is awash with brushes and tubes and sponge pieces and newspaper bits and the like. The end products have been beautiful so it's worth it. Please show us more as you finish them.